I just returned from the ANA Media Leadership Conference in Miami, where I spoke about Madison Avenue's convergence with Mountain View - in other words, the bridge between startups and brands. Throughout the conference, I saw several presenters showcasing their television creative - and in particular their Super Bowl spots. And right afterwards, they showed screenshots of Twitter "reactions," in the form of @comments, retweets and celebrity endorsements. I immediately thought back to a time not so long ago (to be precise, pre-mainstreaming of Twitter) where brand marketers or their agencies would showcase their television buys with a reference to ...

I was in New York last week, and while I was there I discovered it was "Social Media Week." What's funny is that this didn't show up anywhere in my social feed -- I found out over lunch. It seems our industry has a lot of "weeks" and reasons to celebrate ourselves. There's Social Media Week, Internet Week, Advertising Week and of course the many weeks surrounding the Television Upfronts (and Newfronts too). If there was ever an industry that liked to celebrate itself more, I can't imagine what it would be.

"What will advertising look like in 2020?" That was the question posed to me by Jerry Wind, professor of marketing at The Wharton School, and head of Wharton's Future of Advertising, an academic and industry group formed to understand and improve the future of that industry. I'm on the program's advisory board, and this advertising 2020 question is the focus of a compilation of essays from more than 100 industry thought leaders. Here's an abbreviated version of my response:

London, Paris, Milan, Buenos Aires, Mexico City, Prague, Amsterdam, Madrid, Oslo, Hong Kong, and, of course, Cannes. A decade working in media and advertising took me around the world many times. In all, I probably traveled more than a half million miles. The funny thing is that I used to take pride in all of this shuttling to and fro, bragging on social media about my latest geographical conquest. But now that I'm building a tech company and don't need to travel as much, I've realized that I don't miss it. In fact, if I can help it, I won't ...

I love my job. Today I'm filing my column from 38,000 feet, on my way to San Francisco from New York. As usual, I chat with the folks next to me. Turns out the guy to my left is on the marketing team at Facebook, helping companies use the platform more effectively and get better results. "Sweet!" I say. "Can I interview you?"

've been writing this column for about 11 years now, and I've never missed a week. In that time I've listened a lot and spoken quite a bit, and I routinely have to answer the same question: Where do my ideas come from each week?

Marketers are remembering this year's Super Bowl as the one where a power outage created an unprecedented, awkward silence that some big brands capitalized on with real-time marketing response teams. According to an excellent essay on the Harvard Business Review blog, a consistent theme emerged from this year's Super Bowl: "The rigid campaign-based model of advertising, perfected over decades of one-way mass media, is headed for extinction."

Like many media and technology companies, we are planning to staff up as we prepare for our next stage of growth. Many of the qualities we're looking for from prospective employees could be useful to your company as well.

Your business model is not always your business model. McDonald's, for example, is not in the restaurant business; it is in the real estate business. The company buys locations and leases them to franchisees, using fast food as a way of ensuring stable and low-risk rental income. But in order for its property model to work, people have to keep coming back to its franchisees' restaurants -- and so the company has a vested interest in ensuring the greatest possible Big Mac market penetration.

OK, that title has nothing to do with the article itself except for the word "Oreo" -- but along the same lines, neither did Oreo's Super Bowl commercial have anything to do with its stellar opportunistic play on Twitter following the now-famous blackout, when the brand tweeted a photo with the tagline, "You can still dunk in the dark."